Odd Realm News

Hey gang!

Wanted to give a quick update on how things are going with the Tundra update.

I'm making really great progress. I've added a new system to the world which lets me display effects on blocks which opens up the possibility of snow/dust/rust/burns and other similar visual treatment. This system is hand because it can transition over previous textures making things like snow have a more natural appearance.

I've combined this new effect system with the weather system which creates a really cool building up progression:



The above showcases how the winter season progresses. As it snows, the snow will build up on surfaces that are open to the sky. I can think of a couple other fun uses for this such as ash falling from the sky if you are in a volcano biome (which I want to add one of these days).

As well--and I know SO many of you have waited for this--I've added in grass regrowth for when it rains:



The grass will fill appear on top of blocks that allow natural growth such as dirt.

This next week I'll be implementing temperature. The core system should be easy to add but I'm guessing I'll need to add a lot of UI to help communicate why snow is melting or things are setting on fire. I anticipate this system will take me a week to add. Once that's up and running, I'll be implementing the biome specific things such as new animals, trees, plants for the Tundra. I'm hoping to have this update ready and good to go for the end of Feb but no promises! ;P

I'm feeling really good about these additions and I think they make the world feel much more alive. Can't wait to share them with you!

Have a good weekend!

Waylon

Hey friends!

This is a rather brief update on game progress and where I'm at.

The last few weeks I was updating some old systems that were poorly written/designed. That's pretty much done but I'm still working out some of the bugs that arise as I go along.

I'm also in the process of adding more natural 'platforms'. Platforms are more of an internal term for any floors that the game can have. For example, grass, wood tile, clay shingles, snow, etc. The bottom face of the game's block, essentially. Natural platforms are ones which appear on their own in the world. The two which I'm working on are grass and snow. Before, grass and snow were simply texture swaps to the grass platform. When I entered a new season I'd swap those textures. Now, those platforms will appear based on the tuning information for weather and season. So, when it rains, grass for that season will naturally grow and appear on dirt blocks. In Winter, if it's snowing, snow platforms will appear on all surfaces exposed to the sky. So, you'd have snow on your rooftops and such. All these weather and season sets are now tuned based on the biome. So, you'll no longer see that weird snow bug in the Tropical biome.

These new changes open up a lot of fun possibilities because I can now have varying seasons per biome, varying season lengths, unique seasons, unique weather per season, etc. For example, I could have the dust storm weather in the Desert spawn things like sand. Or, I could add a unique season to the Voidlands where everything is chaotic, weird plants growing out of control, temperatures swinging about wildly. That's just spitballing, but can see the potential.

After this, I'm jumping onto implementing the temperature system itself. This is what I was describing in my last post. Namely, biomes having a baseline temperature which is affected by weather and season. And then having props control temperature. Heating a house, keeping a greenhouse warm enough to grow crops and so on.

Anyway, the combination of re-writing a lot of the core game and adding in these new features has resulted in a very long wait for a new game update and I apologize for the delay. I know it's easy for games to seem like they are abandoned in this genre but have faith that I'm still trucking along. That's why I like to do my normal weekly updates. This one, however, is just impossible to get out at that normal cadence. Thanks so much for all your patience.

Best,

Waylon

Hello friends!

Happy New Year! Hope you all are having a great 2020 so far.

Today marks one year since I released Odd Realm on the Steam store. I wanted to take the time to thank you for coming with me on this journey to make this little game. Your patience, feedback, support, and friendship has kept me going.
I'm also going to talk about what I'm currently working and what's next for the game but first I thought it would be fun to share some of the game's progress and history.

At the end of 2016 I was working as a Gameplay Programmer at a game studio and I desperately wanted to make a game on my own. I had been saving up for about five years to have enough money to live off of in order to do this. Originally, I had planned on quitting my job to make a little adventure game where you played as this sword-wielding, amnesia-ridden, fella trying to solve a mystery in a strange, fantasy world.

This is the first scene of the game. You awake from a cryostasis in this cave/bedroom.

It was turning out to be a fun prototype but the art demand was WAY over my head. At this time I was also playing a bit of our much loved predecessor, Dwarf Fortress. I loved the game but I couldn't stop thinking about a version of it with cute little pixel people moving around the world. The image in my mind was very clear. What you see in the game today, is exactly what I envisioned.

One of the earliest gifs from around March, 2017. As you can see, I re-did everything... multiple times...

So, I made the decision to hand in my notice and try and take a swing at making a DF-lite game where you simply tried to keep some pixel peeps alive. I really didn't intend for the game to be 1/10000 of the depth of DF. I actually just wanted to make a small experience in about a year and a half and release the game and move on. Ha. Ha. Ha.

lol. 'Home Zone.' Another super early gif testing out zoning.

Well, the more I worked on the game, the more systems and features became necessities. This wasn't a bad thing but I only really had two years to ship the game before money ran out. Cut to two years later, Jan 10, 2019, and the game comes out in Early Access! Even after two years, the game was nowhere near what I wanted it to be. Even today, three years later it's not. And I'm ok with that. It has grown into something I really love and I plan to keep working on it until the Ardyn are done. About ten more years. Joooking, of course.

Some more modern gifs from recently.

That leads into what's next!

This has been my first week back to work full time since the holiday began. I decided to start work on adding temperature mechanics to the game. In order to do so, I need to re-write my core code to be faster to allow for the additional CPU overhead of temperature and such. Unfortunately, this means a longer wait for updates than usual. This update has a required a lot of fundamental changes, so I need to slowly go through and test everything because these changes affect a lot of things.

If all goes well with the temperature feature, I should be able to jump onto implementing the Tundra biome! :)

Thanks again for an amazing year. Here's to many more!

Your pal,

Waylon

Hey everyone!

This is a brief post to let you know that I won't be as active on the forum/discord or uploading any updates until the new year. I'll be away visiting family and I need to take a little break from development. I WAS going to move the beta changes to production before heading off on vacation, but it doesn't seem wise to do so as I won't be available to fix things while away. Plus, there are some performance issues in the beta that shouldn't make it into the production version and I want to fix those when I return.

Lastly, I wanted to wish you all a happy holiday and new year if you're celebrating that. Thank you for such a great year. It truly has been an honor to work on the game with this community. :)

All the best,

Waylon

Hello!

Real quick update to inform you all that I've uploaded a small build with fixes for the following:
-Ore not showing up on the mining overlay.
-Ore being visible when it hadn't been uncovered yet. Unfortunately, already visible ore will still be visible on saves pre-0.8.24.1 as they get saved as visible. Post-0.8.24.1 saves should be good to go.
-Incorrect item text showing when items were reserved via the inventory panel.
-Weeds will now have 'time to mature' displayed on tooltips.
-Changed shift increment to ctrl (plus added a special hotkey option in settings so you can change it yourself) in order to avoid overlays being hidden when trying to increment items by 5.
-Removed some debug logs which would occasionally drop framerate.

Thanks!

Waylon